Harry's Place

This is a guest post by Edmund Standing of I Kid You Not

Following the recent leak of the BNP membership list, it may have come as a surprise to find that some members were listed as active Christians. Among these, we find a ‘”Born Again” Protestant Christian’, a ‘Devout Christian lay preacher’, a ‘Minister of Religion’, a ‘Member of the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church’, and a ‘Practising Catholic’. One member lists himself as a member of the ‘British Israel World Federation’ and another as ‘Founder/organiser of Durham British-Israel Fellowship’.

The founder and organiser of Durham British-Israel Fellowship can be safely named as Colin Farquhar, for he is quite public about his support of the BNP and happy to advertise his home address as the contact point for the Fellowship. In addition to believing that ‘[t]he theory of evolution is based on tales, not on fact’, Farquhar also holds some unusual views on the identity of the Biblical Israelites and is rabidly anti-Catholic. In an article posted on a ‘British Israelism’ website, he states:

Let us also pray for, and warn Christians within the Protestant Church to shun the works of darkness and the institutions of Satan no matter what holy guise they appear to be shrouded in.

Let us warn them especially regarding the deceitfulness, error and darkness of the Antichrist Roman Catholic Church; and those organisations such as the World Council of Churches and Churches Together that seek to bring about unity with this Satanic institution.

In order to unravel the bizarre beliefs of Farquhar and the other (listed) BNP member of the British Israel World Federation (BIWF), let’s first have a look at what the BIWF teaches.

Founded in 1919, and currently Registered Charity No. 208079, the BIWF is an organisation that promotes an esoteric interpretation of the Bible, in particular of ‘prophetic’ passages in the Old Testament, which was first popularised in the ‘glory days’ of the British Empire. According to the theory of British Israelism, the British, and other European peoples, are in reality the so-called ‘lost tribes’ of Israel, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who were expelled during the Assyrian Captivity. It is claimed, meanwhile, that the Kingdom of Judah went on to make up modern day Jewry, although Jews are deemed by many to be ‘ethnically mixed’ and consequently no longer ‘pure’ Israelites.

This pseudo-historical belief system allows white nationalists to claim that the Bible is a book written by Europeans, about Europeans, and for Europeans, for according to this theory, Europeans are the Biblical Israelites. British Israelism, then, is a ‘Christian’ religion that promotes Eurocentricism and opposes ‘race mixing’ as an affront to ‘God’s plan’.

On the BIWF website, we find the kind of ‘exegesis’ and pseudo-scholarship used to ‘prove’ this doctrine. For example:

Israel was to have a monarch of the Davidic line: “For thus saith the Lord; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel” (Jeremiah 33:17). The people of the Jews do not have a monarchy and the Church is the Body of Christ, its Lord and Head. It can be shown that the Royal House of Britain is descended from King David. Further, the British monarchs are anointed in the same way as Zadok the Priest anointed the Kings of Israel.

Among the BIWF’s stated aims, we read:

TO ELUCIDATE and to declare the truth regarding the origin and early history of the British, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, whether in the English-speaking countries or elsewhere, and to establish their identity as true Israel, being distinct from the Jewish folk which historically are multi-ethnic.

TO DECLARE and to teach that Almighty God has called the Israel peoples to maintain a separated and sovereign status, and has laid upon them a fixed and irrevocable charge and responsibility to act as His servants and His instruments in making ready the way for the restoration of His Kingdom on earth.

‘A separated and sovereign status’, it turns out, is a wordy way of promoting racial separatism. In a BIWF article entitled ‘The Kingdom Sixty Years On and the Present Danger’, we find, in a section headed ‘Confusion in the Natural Order’, the following:

The question of identity is now very much the concern of Parliament at this moment, due to several million alien peoples that have been allowed to gain citizenship in Britain during the past fifty years, with more than half a million having entered illegally. We no longer know who is in the country resulting in the threat from terrorism being used as a lever to bring in the identity card at vast cost. The integrity of our family structures from the individual family to the national family of race has been undermined. In fact race, a creation of God, is now a politically correct dirty word.

The BIWF doesn’t just have an issue with the ‘undermining’ of ‘race’, but is also homophobic:

Society is now suffering widespread dislocation and as moral standards have become more and more corrupted, the question of sexual identity has also become dominant. Confusion now rules with the most vociferous being those who promote perverted life styles. In fact, the movement against the natural sexual order being upheld in society and in law is such that a form of totalitarianism is now established to persecute those who uphold the righteous or lawful order of personal and family relationships.

So, the BIWF promotes nationalism, ‘racialism’, and homophobia. No wonder it appeals to members of the BNP (as well as being listed on Stormfront and New Nation News forum posts).

Colin Farquhar, of course, is such a fan of this ‘theology’ that he has set up the ‘Durham British-Israel Fellowship’. In the Northern Echo’s July 31st 2003 list of ‘free sessions for teenagers’, we find the following event:

BIBLE RALLY: Pastor Alan Campbell, of the Open Bible Ministries, in Belfast, will be the speaker when the Durham British Israel Fellowship holds its Bible Prophecy Rally on Saturday, August 23, at 2.30pm, in Shakespeare Hall, North Road, Durham.

A look at Campbell’s ‘Open Bible Ministries’ website provides an interesting insight into the beliefs of Farquhar’s ‘British Israel’ associates.

Here we find the same basic beliefs:

Open – Bible Ministries is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is the voice of Israel-Identity believers in Ulster. It’s director, Alan Campbell, has authored over 40 Bible study booklets and has lectured extensively on Protestant and Prophetic platforms throughout the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

Open – Bible Ministries teaches the national historicist interpretation of Bible Prophecy and is dedicated to the proclamation of the full Gospel of the Kingdom setting forth the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour, Healer, Baptiser in the Holy Spirit and soon coming King.

It also seeks to declare the identity of the Celto-Anglo-Saxon peoples as the Israel of God and earnestly contend for the Reformation faith and heritage of these same peoples.

We also find fanatical anti-Catholicism, with a whole section of the website devoted to ‘Rome Watch‘. Campbell sees ‘the entire dynasty of Popes as Antichrist’ and states that

in recent years we have seen, world-wide, a “last days” revival of the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in both the religious and political dimensions. This attempt to establish again a one world religion – Mystery Babylon – is yet a further manifestation of the so called New World Order, and a serious threat to the liberty of all Bible-Believing Christians.

Campbell, it turns out, is keen on conspiracy theories. For example, he promotes the notion that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot and that Mexicans have ‘declare[d] war on the USA’. In Open Bible Ministries’ ‘Recommended Reading and Audio Tapes’ section, we find the following titles for sale:

FOR WHAT SHOULD ULSTER PRAY?
A vital book refuting the bogus “Peace Movements” in our land and showing how when ancient Israel prayed, God destroyed their foes.

BRITAIN AND THE EUROPEAN UNION – DEEPER IN OR COMING OUT?
This in-depth study shows the European Union to be part of the conspiracy to establish a One World Government, Economy and Religion. Amazing evidence from Daniel, Micah and other prophecies of Europe’s doom and Britain’s withdrawal.

We also find a book for sale entitled ‘The Bible is Scientific’, in which, according to Campbell, ‘Dr. B Comparet, distinguished American Lawyer and Bible teacher presents the scientific evidence that proves the Scriptures to be true’. Campbell’s promotion of Comparet as a ‘Bible teacher’ is worrying, for Comparet was a seminal figure in the creation of a modern offshoot of British Israelism termed ‘Christian Identity’. ‘Christian Identity‘ is an extreme racist ‘theology’ that asserts that white Europeans are the true Israelites and claims that Jews are the literal children of Satan, products of a sexual encounter between Eve and Satan in the Garden of Eden, with their ’serpent seedline’ tracing back to Cain. Identity adherents have been responsible for numerous criminal activities in America, including acts of murder and terrorism, and can be found among many of America’s neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, and ‘patriot militia’ organisations.

Comparet is not the only Identity ideologue promoted by Campbell, for he also includes two essays by ‘the late Pastor Sheldon Emry’ on his website. Given the widespread availability of the sermons and writings of Comparet and Emry online, it is simply not possible that Campbell is unaware of their views. We have already seen that Bertrand Comparet is described by Campbell as a ‘distinguished American Lawyer and Bible teacher’. Let’s look at some of his ‘distinguished’ teachings.

According to Comparet, ‘The Bible is Not a Jewish Book‘ and the Jewish people are ‘The Cain/Satanic Seedline‘. Comparet writes contemptuously of the ‘typical hook nosed Jew’, speaks of ’satanic, mongrel, Edomite Jews’ and states:

It has been brought to my attention many times, that there are preachers and teachers in the world who don’t recognize there are literal children of Satan surviving in the world today. Since this is one of the central themes of the Bible, the fight for supremacy between the children of Yahweh and the children of Lucifer, I wonder what Bible these preachers and teachers are reading and studying.

Comparet claims that ‘In the Bible, God repeatedly warns us against any mixing of races and especially against intermarriage and mongrelization’. Consequently, he writes of the virtues of ‘racial purity’ and condemns the production of ‘half-breed, mongrel children’.

Campbell promotes one of Comparet’s writings on the ’scientific’ nature of the Bible. Comparet certainly had an interesting understanding of science. According to him, modern science’s dating of the age of the earth is essentially correct, but white people have only existed on earth for a few thousands years, which was inhabited before this by ‘pre-Adamic’ peoples, which Comparet identifies as ‘the dark races’. Using a tortured interpretation of Biblical texts, Comparet claims that ’some races God classifies as animals’ or ‘beasts of the field’. These ‘animals’ are identified by Comparet as ‘negroes’. He claims that ‘God Commands Racial Segregation‘ and that, while ‘we don’t hate negroes’, ‘neither negroes nor Whites will have the blessings of civilization in a nation reduced to black standards of thinking’.

As we have seen, the other ‘Identity’ writer promoted by Campbell is Sheldon Emry. Things don’t get much better here, either. In ‘Who Are Israelites‘, an article posted on Campbell’s website, Emry asks: ‘Is it possible the Jews are not Israelites after all, but that instead you folks, whose ancestors came from Europe are the true descendants of the Israelites?’ Of course, his answer is ‘yes’:

If we believed God, we would be able to find Israel in the world today by simply looking for the people who have His Word. Who are they? Any fool can find them. They stick out like a sore thumb among the nations. They are the white Anglo-Saxon and kindred nations or peoples of Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia/New Zealand. They alone of all the races of the earth print, distribute, preach, profess, claim and hold on to the Bible, the Word of God (the Jews sure don’t do any of these things!).

He goes on to to identify Communism as a Jewish conspiracy:

Once you begin to understand that Jesus and Israel are related, allied in purpose, then the current gathering of all nations of the world under the red banner of Communism (now called the New World Order) against Christ and Christendom suddenly comes into focus. Why are the anti-Christs making war against the White Race?

Well, they know we are Israel, and they know they must destroy our race in order to destroy God’s work upon the earth. The truth that we are Israel is the key to understanding the Bible, current world events, and what we can expect in the future.

In further writings of Emry found on Campbell’s website, he claims that ‘out [sic] government [is] infiltrated by and under the control of anti-Christ people’ and speaks of ‘anti-Christ international conspirators’. Emry complains that ‘Ministers tell millions of our young people that the Jews are “God’s Chosen People” … and that the Old Testament is about other people, the Jews. They are totally unable to show the relevance of the Scripture to our race, our nation, or our time, when the truth of the matter is that the Scripture is primarily about our race, our nation and our time!’ He continues:

Let’s tell our children the truth about Israel, that we the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Germanic, and kindred peoples are the true descendants of the twelve sons of Israel, and that our great nation and the great Christian nations of Europe are the nations promised to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Let us prove to them that we have a covenant-keeping God, that the Bible is the Word of God, that it is true, and we have been Redeemed by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. As a minister, I can say that nothing will open up the Bible, or prove its Truth, like the true identity of Israel today!

Elsewhere, in his widely available ‘An Open Letter to Any Minister Who Teaches the Jews are Israel’, Emry writes of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and denies the Holocaust, referring to it as ‘the Jew story that “Hitler killed 6 million Jews”‘. In the same letter, he states:

The evidence proving the present day “Jews” are NOT “the house of Israel” is endless. History gives abundant proof that the White, Nordic Race sprang from dispersed Israel. The White Christian nations are the seed of Abraham through whom all the world is to be blessed. WE ARE ISRAEL! [...] History and Scripture prove the people known as “Jews” today are not only NOT Israel, but are actually the ENEMIES OF ISRAEL. For God, who knows the end from the beginning, foresaw all this, as we have seen from the Holy Word.

Here we see the writings of ‘preachers’ promoted by Alan Campbell, a man invited to speak at a publicly advertised ‘Bible Rally’ organised by BNP member Colin Farquhar.

This is not the first time a BNP member has been found to have a connection to the hateful teachings of ‘Christian Identity’. In the year 2000, a website appeared at the address christianidentity.org.uk and continued until 2005. The self-styled ‘pastor’ who ran the website promoted the extreme ‘two-seedline’ Identity ‘theology’ and provided a wealth of hardcore Identity teachings and links to numerous neo-Nazi organisations. The main organisation promoted by the ‘pastor’ was the BNP:

ISN’T IT TIME YOU VOTED BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY? VISIT THEIR WEBSITE FROM OUR LINKS PAGES.
BNP IS BRINGING DECENCY BACK TO OUR NATION.

Claiming ‘Our Government Is Our Enemy’, the website railed against what it claimed were the ’sins’ of Britain:

Globalists
Racemixers
Traitor Governments
Homosexuals
False Prophets
Vicars and Priests
Children of the Devil (John 8: 44)
Anti-Christ Socialists
Currency Speculators
The World Bank
Drug Pedlars [sic]
The International Monetary Fund
The United Nations
ALL WORKING FOR
The Synagogue of Satan

In 2005, the website excitedly announced that ‘THE BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY NOW HAS 16 COUNCILLORS’ and provided a page extolling their virtues.

Investigating Christian Identity for an undergraduate essay, I contacted the ‘pastor’ posing as an Identity believer and duly received a couple of CDs, one featuring an Identity ’sermon’ and one featuring a National Front era speech given by veteran Nazi and BNP founder John Tyndall.

In 2005, the website disappeared, but this was not to be the last attempt to mix a racist form of Christianity with promotion of the BNP, for 2006 saw the emergence of a group calling itself ‘The Christian Council of Britain’.

While initially posing as an independent conservative Christian organisation, it was soon revealed that BNP activists had been responsible for setting up the group and that its first website was being run by BNP member Steve Blake, a man whose company ‘Aurora Promotions’ imported Nazi propaganda from the US in the 1980s.

The current Christian Council website is registered in the name of a company called Cinemavision, which turns out to be owned by none other than the BNP’s ‘web guru‘ and Poughill and Standon electoral candidate Simon Bennett. Cinemavision is a website that turns out to feature some interesting content, including an entry linking to a video described as ‘Kim Kardashian Amateur Porn’, featuring the distinctly un-’Aryan’ beauty Kim and her black boyfriend Ray J. ‘She is sooo hot!’ reads the description on Bennett’s website, who is obviously not adverse to making a few pounds from promoting ‘race mixing’.

Returning to the Christian Council of Britain, we find that self-styled ‘Reverend’ Robert West, a man who also appears on the BNP’s leaked membership list and is quite open about his support for the organisation, has stated that the Council was formed because the mainstream churches (who have strongly condemned the Council) ‘have almost become extinct in their faithfulness to holy scripture’. According to West, a ‘faithful’ reading of the Bible leads to the conclusion that ‘[t]he mixing of races challenges the glory of God’ and that a multi-ethnic society is ‘a transgression of God’s will’.

The Christian Council does not appear in its official statements to support Christian Identity ideas, but it does promote a ‘Christian’ ideology of racial separatism. According its Constitution, in a section on ‘The Gift of Race and Nation’:

The Christian Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland resolved that it recognises that all men are of one blood (or proto-race) in Adam through to Noah; and that from that one proto-race divergent races have historically devolved – Russian doll-like – (Genesis 11: 1-9) so that we are now different, though related, races and nations of men, all of whom God has made (Psalms 86: 9); which are each to bring their own distinctive glory into the kingdom of God (Revelation 21: 26). The Christian Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland therefore resolved to recognise the godly importance of race and nation as groups based on this historical and providential process of objective descent: giving rise to different organically-formed communities; sharing and passing-on common genetically inherited (physical, intellectual and character) features together with cultures, mores, relationships, loyalties, memories, and identities in common; and ultimately – by the will of God – national homelands (Genesis 10:5, 20,31,32) where an ongoing connection between land and people has developed and can be encouraged and preserved (Acts 17: 26). The Christian Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland recognises these facts and privileges, especially with regard to the historic British people whose land this is. The Christian Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland therefore resolved especially to welcome the British as such a People, and as individuals, into membership.

In October 2007, the Christian Council began hosting a series of ‘public debates on morality and family values’. Hatewatch reports that:

The keynote speaker at the inaugural CCB conference in London was none other than Dr. Paul Cameron, the infamous anti-gay crackpot psychologist based in Colorado Springs, Colo. Under the guise of the Family Research Institute, his one-man statistical chop shop, Cameron churns out reams of pseudo-scientific “studies” invariably concluding that homosexuals are menaces to society.

So, as with the British Israel World Federation, here we see a British ‘Christian’ group promoting the view that ‘race mixing’ is sinful and supporting homophobia.

That BNP members are promoting racialised forms of Christianity should be of great concern to us all. Colin Farquhar’s connection to Alan Campbell, an extremist who promotes the writings of ‘Christian Identity’ preachers, is particularly worrying. The violence associated with Christian Identity teachings has so far largely been confined to America, but if such ideas take hold among Britain’s fascists this could become genuinely dangerous.

In April 1999, a former BNP member made contact with Christian Identity groups in America and visited the website of Kingdom Identity Ministries, a ‘church’ that promotes the teachings of, amongst others, Bertrand Comparet and Sheldon Emry. That same month, this former BNP member carried out three nail bombing attacks in London, killing 3 people and injuring 129. This man was, of course, David Copeland.

Following his capture, Copeland wrote to a BBC correspondent from Broadmoor special hospital. Copeland denied he was suffering from mental illness and explained his motivation:

The Jew, devil’s disciples and peoples of mud must be driven out of our land. It is God’s law and we must obey. I bomb the blacks, ‘pakkies’, degenerates. I would have bombed the Jews as well if I’d got a chance.

If we ignore British fascists’ links to warped racist versions of Christianity, we do so at our peril.